The Return of Pierre Étaix and “Le Grand Amour”

The history of cinema fills in its blind spots daily, thanks to the tireless efforts of programmers, curators, and restorers. For me, as for many in New York, an image that emerges today from out of the past is that of the French director Pierre Étaix, whose name had hovered before my eyes as a dim phantom thanks to the inclusion of his film “Yoyo” on Jean-Luc Godard’s ten-best list for 1965. Today, Film Forum launches its retrospective of Étaix’s films with a weeklong run of his 1969 feature “Le Grand Amour” (which I’ve written about in the magazine this week)—one of those cinematic marvels that leaves me shaking my head and wondering where it has been all my life.

The practical answer is that, like Étaix’s other films, it was held up for several decades by legal wrangling over rights. By way of introduction: Étaix was born in 1928 (happily, he’s living and working, and will be on hand tonight for the 7:30 screening), worked as an illustrator and a clown (the literal, face-painted, cherry-nosed, baggy-pants kind), and contributed designs and gags for Jacques Tati’s “Mon Oncle.” Étaix’s famous stage act led to his casting, by Robert Bresson, as a graceful grifter in “Pickpocket.” Short films in collaboration with the great screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière followed—one of them, “Happy Anniversary,” won an Oscar (it’s playing along with “Le Grand Amour”). His gags are reminiscent of Tati’s mechanized bodily ingenuity, but where Tati was a pointillistic ironist of tightly oscillating frustrations—and a romantic who saw natural passions stifled by rational modernity—Étaix is a well-mannered anarchist for whom passions themselves are corrupted and dubious. His humor is compassionate and tender but offers no exit—his wistful sweetness rapidly crystallizes to the sharp corners and cutting edges of exasperation, derision, and despair.

“Le Grand Amour” is a tale of a bourgeois couple in a provincial town that starts out with the groom’s antic flashbacks from the altar, which quickly dispel any illusion of marital devotion and undying love. Rather, the shaky ground prepares the viewer, like the groom (played by Étaix), for the constraining misery and frantic flailing that follows. Many of the exquisitely constructed, often amazingly grandiose gags evoke the realm of fantasy, which seems like a sort of X-ray of the inner rot of the cosseted class. Seeing “Le Grand Amour,” I was instantly reminded of a French movie made a year earlier, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” (coming soon to DVD from Criterion). Étaix’s way is altogether less provocative, less intellectual, and more overtly comical—but no less absolute. His vision of the mores and minutiae of the respectables and the notables is equally contemptuous, and his ending similarly suggests a state of crisis.

It’s no surprise that Étaix followed “Le Grand Amour” up with a documentary—“Land of Milk and Honey” (playing at Film Forum on Oct. 28)—an astonishing one, which achieves a similar effect through more radical means. Étaix is an extreme malgré lui; his comic technique, moral sense, and taste led him out into extremes that clash with the lovable clown’s bittersweet warmth. He’s like the cartoon character who pursues his single-minded ends at top speed until he finds himself suspended in midair over the abyss.

P.S. There’s a five-disk set of Étaix’s films available in France; I hope it comes to the American market soon. This opens up an entirely different riff, on how video releases can fill in the blind spots. Take Jacques Rozier, one of the greatest French directors of the last half-century, whose films are virtually unseen here; or those of Jean Eustache, of which the same can be said. What about the films of Jean Rouch (coming soon to French Institute Alliance Française and Anthology Film Archives), including the documentary he co-directed with Edgar Morin, “Chronicle of a Summer”?

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